Microsoft Aims to Show People Its Time to Break the Google Habit

By Todd R. Weiss |
Posted 2012-09-06

Microsoft Bing to Google: Our Search Is Better Than Your Search

Microsoft is asking millions of Web searchers
to break their longtime Google search habits and give the software giant's Bing
search engine a new try in a catchy "Bing It On Challenge" that isaimed at growing Bing's
market share in the search wars.

The "Bing It On"
campaign was born out of a recent search study commissioned by Microsoft that
looked at user opinions on the search engines they were using and the accuracy
of the results they were getting, according to a post by Mike Nichols, chief
marketing officer for Bing, on the Bing Search Blog.

"A while ago, we began to notice an
interesting trend in our internal testing-for the first time our testing showed
that Bing's
Web search results were better than Google's," wrote Nichols. "We
continued testing our results in several different ways as part of our regular
work to improve our quality, and along the way an interesting pattern
emerged-Bing was regularly beating Google in Web search results
quality."

Those early findings inspired Microsoft to
dive deeper to find out what it meant.

"So, we asked an independent research
company to do a statistically significant similar challenge test and our
findings were confirmed-people preferred Bing Web search results nearly 2:1
over Google in blind comparison tests," wrote Nichols. "Since relevancy
of search results is the No. 1 driver of search engine preference, the time is
right for a wake-up call for searchers-better Web search results are available
at Bing.com."

With that, Microsoft is unveiling the
"Bing It On Challenge," a Web page where users are being encouraged
to see for themselves how their Web searches are being conducted side-by-side
by Bing and Google. The key is that both visible searches are not identified
with their Bing or Google logos. Once at the Website, users enter a search term
and are asked to judge which of the two search screens gives them the best
search results. After five "rounds" of side-by-side, nonscientific,
blind search comparisons, the site tells you which search engine you found most
useful-Bing or Google.

So what's the point of this blind "taste
test?"

"Our mission is to show people it's time
to break the 'Google habit' and that Bing has reached a quality level that will
make it easy to switch," wrote Nichols.

Microsoft Aims to Show People Its Time to Break the Google Habit

The Bing It On Challenge is part of a new
advertising campaign that Microsoft will be pushing over the coming months,
according to the company. The ads feature random users in San Francisco who
participated in the challenge and shared their opinions on Bing and Google.

The search comparison research sponsored by
Microsoft was conducted by independent research company Answers Research using
a representative
online sample of nearly 1,000 adults over age 18 across the United States,
according to Microsoft. "The participants were chosen from a random survey
panel and were required to have used a major search engine in the past
month," states a Sept. 5 Microsoft Bing Search Blog post.

In the survey, participants were shown
searches of their choice in the side-by-side, unmarked search format. After the
searches, the participant's votes were tallied to determine the winner-Bing,
Google or a draw.

Of the nearly 1,000 participants, 57.4
percent chose Bing more often, 30.2 percent chose Google more often and 12.4
percent resulted in a draw, according to Microsoft. The overall sampling error
rate for the study is plus or minus 3 percent.

Despite the new ad campaign, Bing
sure has its work cut out for it to catch up to Google based on the latest
search engine usage statistics for the United States, according to the Web
analytics firm ComScore. Though Microsoft's search engine usage in the United
States increased slightly by 0.01 percent since June, Google still dominates
Web search with 66.8 percent of the U.S. market, according to ComScore's July
figures. Bing captured 15.7 percent of users, and Yahoo sites captured 13
percent of users. They are trailed by Ask Network sites, capturing 3.1 percent
of users, and AOL, with 1.5 percent of the market, according to the figures.
The numbers are for what ComScore calls explicit core searches, or those that
exclude slide shows and contextual links in text.

About 17.7 billion overall searches were
conducted in July by U.S. users, according to ComScore, which is an increase of
3 percent since June. Google search was used for 11.8 billion of those
searches, an increase of 3 percent, while Microsoft search was used 2.8 billion
times, for an increase of 4 percent. Yahoo search came in third with 2.3
billion searches, up 3 percent from June, while Ask Network was used for 548
million searches, an increase of 6 percent, and AOL was used in 264 million
searches.